December 18, 2009

Wow, this is cool. I’m on a Virgin America flight headed for San Francisco and I’m updating my blog using my cellphone going though the in-flight wifi. Sweet! Fortunately the wifi is free otherwise I’m too cheap to pay for this 😉 They also have games in the headrests, which actually includes Doom! Unbelievable.

So I’m ultimately heading for Seattle, San Francisco is just a layover. I’m heading to Seattle to bring the wife and kid back home finally. It’s been five months since they left, so this is a much overdue homecoming. We’re driving a U-Haul and her car down to LA over the weekend. We’re going to spend the night in Roseburg OR tonight (the kid has his OWN ROOM!!), then stay at my moms place in San Francisco on Saturday night, then it’s just a 5-6 hour drive home from there on Sunday.

Hope the dogs will be okay. I’ve got a friend taking care of them while I’m gone but didn’t really have much of a chance to introduce them. All he really has to do is say the word “food” and I’m sure they will let him in.

Looks like we’re starting head in for the landing now, I’d better wrap this up.

UPDATE: I’m on the second leg of my journey to Seattle. I thought I’d test out the wifi a little more and decided to access my server over ssh, which worked. Awesome. Then I ordered a few movies from Frys, which worked. Double Awesome. The only thing I can’t seem to do at the moment is connect to the vpn at my work, but that’s not really important I guess. It would be nice if I could do that though.

I did a speed test using http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ and the results were 361kb download and 307kb upload. Not too bad but I wish the little “kb” was a big “KB” instead…. I copied a 12M file from my server (using scp) which took a minute 50 seconds to transfer and the average transfer rate was about 106KB.

Ok, enough techie stuff for now. I’m just trying to see what this wifi is capable of and if it is something I could ultimately use. I’d give it 3.8 out of 4 stars. The only thing really lacking is vpn access, but that might be something on my side (although I doubt it since it works over normal wifi). I can get around vpn access if I just use ssh so it’s only a minor hindrance. Still not sure if I’d pay for it but then again I’m not really sure how much it costs either. If it’s only a coupla bucks then I’d most likely pay, especially on longer flights.

November 29, 2009

It’s been a strange 48 hours. I found out Thursday night that Nickey has a boyfriend – yay, on Thanksgiving Day. Ok, that’s to be expected. After all it’s been since the end of June since she’s lived here. I talked to her on Friday and asked her about it and somehow the conversation turned into us trying to work things out, I’m honestly not sure who started the topic. So we talked for a while and decided to pick up the conversation again in the morning. It was a rough night for me. She called in the morning and said she had been thinking about things all night and that she remembered all of the “bad stuff”. Why is it she always thinks of all the good times we’ve had until I want to really work things out, then it’s all the bad stuff? To sum things up, it sounds like she’s not into working things out after all. What a pit I’m in – she was the one I waited for, the only one I’ve deemed worthy of marrying, the one I was fully expecting to spend the rest of my life with. Meh.

Alright, enough with the heavy stuff. Today was a decent day. I woke up at 10, played with the dogs, then went on the road trip I promised the dogs. First we stopped off at Barger Harley because I needed some new gloves. The one’s I’ve been using are perforated so the rides home after work have been pretty cold lately. After that we started out towards Ojai, the initial destination, but traffic was horrible. Instead we went down towards Malibu on Topanga Canyon and stopped off at a cool store called Hidden Treasures. I’ve mentioned it before in a couple of my posts – it’s kind of a hippy shop with used clothing, incense burning, some bizarre antiquities, and that’s also where I bought my acoustic guitar recently. I bought some incense and then continued on down to Malibu. We drove down toward Santa Monica, explored a few side streets I hadn’t been down before, then headed back home. We stopped off at McDonalds and I bought the pups a burger, which Zoe enjoyed and Loki swallowed whole. I ended up taking a 2 hour nap after that – I had just eaten and I put on golf, what can I say :). When I woke up I decided to tackle one of the projects that had been on my list for a long time. I dumped out the planters in the backyard, refilled them with soil, then planted grass seeds, and covered them in clear plastic – sort of like a greenhouse. The hope is to grow grass in them for the dogs, they used to eat the plants in them anyway so grass would probably be better for them.

So to end off the night I’m watching School of Rock and practicing on the guitar. Now that work will hopefully be slowing down quite a bit I’m going to make it my mission to learn how to play the guitar better. I’ve got two of them, you’d think I’d know how to play something on them….

Unfortunately this is the quality of the post you get from me when I have a lot of free time. I do usually use my blogs as a method of ranting about useless crap, so I guess I’ll have to get back to that again. I’m missing a few important key ingredients though – I need to dine on microwave cheese sandwiches with ketchup, and drink Jack and Coke. That’s when my posts are the most insightful 😉

November 26, 2009

This year has flown by. I guess when you are absorbed in your job for 70-90 hours a week that can happen…. Fortunately we finally deployed the final piece of the game last week so we will *hopefully* be slowing down to somewhat normal hours finally. If not then there may very well be a major uprising by several of the crew.

I think this is the first holiday we’ve had off in some time (although I think we did have labor day “off”). I have been slowly taking advantage of the time off and have been cleaning up the house room by room – something that has been direly needed for some time. I still have a long way to go but I should be able to get it done by the end of the weekend. I’ve been spending as much time with the dogs as I can too because I haven’t been around much to give them attention. I think we’re going to go for a ride tomorrow to some, as of yet unknown, location.

Today has been surprisingly pretty good. Although I haven’t feasted like the rest of the masses in this fine country, I have been enjoying the day quite a bit. I had to work until early this morning and didn’t wake up until about 1pm but, contrary to my normal M.O., I got started pretty much right away. I’ve been upgrading my computer all day (it is at least 3 revs. of Ubuntu behind!), cleaned the house, played with the dogs, blared my new Kid Rock cd, etc. I ran out of cigarettes early this afternoon so I got dressed and headed out to the local 7-11. I felt very biker-ish with the beard, longer hair, the chain wallet and my CBGB t-shirt. I rode the bike to the store and since it was about 75 decided it was nice enough to forgo the jacket. I got the smokes and then went for a ride. It was one of the nicest rides I’ve had so far on the new bike. Perfect temp, not much traffic, and made most of the lights. It was a short ride – only about 45 minutes – but it helped to recharge me a little. It makes a big difference riding without a jacket, much less restrictive and freeing. I love my bike.

November 20, 2009

Today was my birthday, the big 4-0. How the hell did that happen?? Can’t say as I feel any different than I did 10 years ago but I suppose it’s all relative. Fortunately for me most people are surprised when they find out how old I am, but then again I’m still a child on the inside.

The day started out, well, I guess normal for how my life has been lately. I got up at noon (had been at work until past 2am the day before). I went to “breakfast” with my boss, which is a normal morning thing. We went to the same place we always go – it’s a place called Hearts. This morning was a bit different than normal in that there was a crew there filming for a Census commercial. I was *hoping* that they were filming My Name is Earl (Hearts has been in a few of the episodes) and that they had revived the series, but one of the crew members confirmed that it wasn’t. After that we left for work.

Today was pretty hectic at work because we are releasing the store part of our game (League of Legends) tonight. I’m not the one doing the deploy but I have to be there at 6am in the morning for the second coverage shift. It’s a pretty big deal because we were supposed to release the store three weeks ago but there were some pretty big issues with it so the developers had to bring it all in-house and has been working feverishly on it. We are all pretty excited about it going out and can’t wait to watch the daily numbers. I got home early tonight, midnight, and should really head off to bed. For anyone who knows me they know I am in no way a morning person, and I have to get up in 4.5 hours. Ugh.

The highlight of the day was Hayden called me and sang me Happy Birthday. I wish I had been able to record it! That is one awesome kid, I sure miss him.

November 7, 2009

It ‘s amazing to me how fast this year has gone by, but then again I’ve been mired in work and other things so time is bound to go by quickly I guess. Already a week into November? Dang.

So far SoCal has been living up to my expectations. In the last month there has only been 2 days of rain, some of the nights have been really foggy on the city side but clear in the valley, and the daytime temps have been in the 70’s-80’s. That’s why I wanted to move here. Last weekend I went to Seattle and it rained every day there. I do not miss that at all. I would never be able to justify owning a motorcycle in Washington, I just wouldn’t get to ride it enough. Here I ride it every day except when it rains – which is about 2-3 weeks a year.

As I mentioned, I went to Seattle last weekend to see Hayden. We spent about 24 hours together and had some fun. We went trick-or-treating, went to lunch with my Mom and Bob, went to Chuck-E-Cheeses, and had a sleepover at my Dads place. It was a bit weird seeing Nickey for the first time in three months but things went ok, although she seems to feel the need to tell me way to much about her personal life. We have been tentatively talking about Hayden coming down to stay with me for about a week after Christmas which would be really cool. Just a couple of “dudes” hanging out together.

Apparently my neighbors house was almost broken into 2 weeks ago. She got hit last year too, but this time someone saw them so they took off before they could take anything. She asked if I could put one of my dogs in her backyard during the day on the weekdays to try to discourage them from coming back again. Even though Loki is much more intimidating I think Zoe is a better fit for the job because she’s easier to manage. My neighbor just had back surgery a few months back and I’d be afraid Loki would hurt her. He’s such a brute sometimes. As it turns out my neighbor is actually afraid of Loki anyway, and Zoe is doing a good job so she was definitely the right choice for the job.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me and my personal computers. About two weeks ago my personal laptop at work had the hard drive die on me, then today I had the hard drive in my home laptop go bad and the power supply in my desktop die. It’s a good thing I have the netbook work gave me otherwise I’d be computer free at the moment. That can’t happen…..

October 4, 2009

Things at work have been high paced (higher than normal), high stress, and long hours the last few weeks. This past week was one of the worst so far. We’ve had to do a few 2am site restarts, 5am deploys, and most nights I don’t get home until sometime after 11pm. Between Tuesday and Wednesday I got a combined total of 7.5 hours of sleep. In a weird way it’s pretty rewarding. It’s unfortunate that we need to work such long hours in order to make any progress but hopefully it will slow down considerably once we find another SA and after the game finally launches.

Yesterday I went to lunch with the crew from MonsterTrak. We were going to have a bbq at my place but since there were a few that couldn’t make it we decided on just meeting for lunch. I’m actually glad it worked out that way because I haven’t had any time to get things ready for the bbq anyway. After lunch I came home and crashed for about 3 very needed hours.

Today is Hayden’s birthday, he’s 7 years old now. I don’t remember why, but he opened his gifts yesterday and called me while he opened the one from me. I wish I could have seen him open them, but the phone call was good too.

September 18, 2009

As I’ve mentioned before, where I work is now in hyper crunch mode. We are going live on the 22nd of this month and things are no where near ready, at least as far as I can see. Today I had to leave the dogs alone for 16.5 hours because it was one hellatious day, I left at 10am in the morning and didn’t get home until 4:30am today. I spent 6 hours at the datacenter in the morning setting up systems, battled for 4 hours with a web server in the afternoon (which ended up winning unfortunately), then another 5 hours at the datacenter after that. No lunch, a couple of smoke breaks, and back and forth to the datacenter a few times. It’s a good thing I love what I do…. I really feel bad for the dogs tho, they didn’t get to eat dinner until almost 5am.

August 9, 2009

About four and a half years ago the most important woman in my life found me on Friendster. I was looking for her but she managed to find me, and captivated me with a simple phrase – something to the effect of “I found your profile so funny, I think a little pee came out”. Magic. I still remember that day when I received the message from her. I was showing everyone at work.

We had a few days of exchanging emails before she asked me for my phone number and asked me out on a date. We ended up on a freight train romance that no one could stop. People tried, but no one succeeded. I blogged proudly of my new romance, boasted about my son, we took road trips every weekend – just pointed ourselves in a direction and drove until we decided to turn around. Flowers, little gifts, and lots of attention was the norm.

Somewhere along the way “the norm” became watching tv, a constant flow of home projects, and me working long hours. The bills owned us so we never went anywhere anymore, and we had moved to California leaving our families behind so there was no easy solution for babysitting. Needless to say, the romance had vanished.

Now I sit here alone in the house with my two dogs. A house with termites and a few big half finished projects, and with scattered debris from when she moved out. I don’t even have the motivation to clean it up. Why didn’t I treat my Ms. Wow better? Why did I end up taking her for granted?

October 16, 2008

We are currently in Carlsbad California for a regional meeting for the business coaching company that Nickey belongs to. <A HREF=”http://www.popby.com”>Popby.com</A> is one of the three sponsors of the meeting and we have a great setup with a bunch of pop-by gifts on display, a business card raffle for a gift certificate, candy, baloons, and laptops that are connected to the web so we can have people take a look at the Popby.com site live and in person. I’m actually at the meeting now during a break doing this post. Pretty nice setup I think. We’ve been getting a lot of attention too so we’re more than likely going to make sponsorship money back.

Hayden is with a “nanny” for the day. She is from Playtime Pros who do some of the kid outings during the Brian Buffini business subscriber Mastermind retreat in San Diego and we know he is in excellent hands. They went to Legoland for the day and apparently he’s not going on any of the rides, but is sequestered in the building area using that huge imagination of his. I’m sure he’s having a good time.

I took the day off today so I could be here to help out. After all, I am the Popby I.T. Guy. It’s been a crazy week for me though with big things going on at work and big problems with my consulting job. It was a full moon this week so that’s got to be it….right?

September 9, 2008

Last weekend my Mom and Bob came to town to see us for a few days. They flew down on Friday morning to start a week or so long adventure. They left our house Monday morning and were heading to Disneyland and possibly Catalina, then to a B&B up the coast, to Bob’s sisters, and then back home again. While they were visiting with us we were treated to some good food, and we also got the opportunity to have them watch Hayden a couple of times so Nickey and I could go out and do a few things.

One of the things we were able to do while they were watching Hayden was to go out for a date night. It didn’t end up how we had planned – dinner at the Stinking Rose (garlic) restaurant – but we still had a great time. The plans were changed because we went out to Irwindale to buy a scooter for Nickey which ended up taking a lot longer than we expected it would. She looks really cute on the scooter. We then had dinner at the Claim Jumper, which we hadn’t been to since probably back when we lived in Seattle. I’ll get my hands on a picture of the scooter and put it up here, hopefully a picture of her riding it to show how good she looks on it.

Hayden successfully completed the first week of first grade without too much of a problem. It’s hard to know for sure how he is going to accept a change in his schedule but he has adapted quite quickly. If I remember correctly, last year it took him a few weeks to get into the swing of things before he got used to the routine. I’ve been walking with Nickey and Hayden to school in the morning to see him off. He’s so cute – he’s so little and he hasn’t grown into his clothes yet which makes him look even littler! Hopefully he’ll be able to stay focused and do well on his schoolwork, I know that was a tough one for me at that age.

I passed my motorcycle class last weekend which means I’ll be getting a certificate in the mail that I can take to the DMV and get my motorcycle endorsement. Whew! I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make it since the riding classes were soooo early in the morning, but I was able to get up for them okay and wasn’t even late. I was fortunate that I had been riding my motorcycle before the class so it made the lessons easier than it was for those who hadn’t been riding yet. I’m just glad it’s over with. I’m still nervous to go on the freeway, but at least I now have the option. I really want to take the advanced class but I will have to see when and where it is.

There’s probably more stuff to blog about, but I’m at work so I should probably make it look like I am actually working 🙂

Normally I don’t walk around town much, but due to a change in life recently I’ve been doing a lot more walking over the past two weeks. The city where I live now is not where I’ve spent most of my life. I grew up in a big city where people still say “Thank-you” when […]

To get me back in the swing of updating my blog again, I thought I’d throw out a question for anyone who has an opinion about it – is it more eco to ride public transportation or a motorcycle? I know that’s somewhat of a nebulous question since there are several types of motorcycles and […]

We’re moving from an apartment to a house next month, finally. The house will afford me the ability to start getting back into my eco-projects again, and I’ll be able to start posting updates and project details like I used to a few years ago. I’m really looking forward to it. I really want to […]

As promised *here*, here is the comparison between running a desktop and a raspberry pi. My raspberry pi setup is as such: 2x raspberry pi’s 2x external usb hard drives – one ssd, one sata 1x 8 port 3.0 usb hub Network hub is not measured in this test… Here are the results for the pi’s: […]

Back in February (only a few short months ago….) I stated I wanted to find out if it was possible to Replace your computer with a Raspberry Pi. I’ve been using my two raspberry pi’s since last February and replaced my former desktop, but never set about to measure the difference in power consumption – […]

I’ve had to move my blog a few times recently for various reasons. The last location was an AWS micro instance that just couldn’t keep up with running several blogs and a mysql server (yeah, well duh….). It limped along as valiantly as it could but I’ve finally found a new home for my blogs […]

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be working on replacing my full sized desktop computer, that used a 500w power supply, with a couple of credit card sized full function computers called Raspberry Pi. This little guy won’t be able to fully replace my desktop or laptop, but only because flash for web […]

“What!?!”, you may say. That sounds pretty non-eco, right? Lots of water being wasted…just down the drain. I’ve heard over and over again that shaving in the shower is bad for the environment. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s much more eco than you may think, if it’s done the right way. I’m […]

I’m sure I can’t be the only one that has a certain level of frustration with how the general mentality of the workforce is so lackadaisical toward environmentalism. Where I work, there are several recycle bins for cans and bins for paper – but what gets put in them? Trash. Grease stained boxes from lunch, […]

I’m glad to see there are more and more trends toward making computing datacenters as power efficient as possible. There are options now for lower power consumption servers, more datacenters are using solar and alternate cooling methods to further reduce their carbon footprint, and then there is Facebooks datacenter – which is described as the […]